PART II

_ÆSTHETIC AND ETHICAL VALUES_

LECTURE III

ÆSTHETIC AND THEISM

I

In this lecture I have undertaken to consider certain beliefs and

emotions relating to beauty, and to inquire how far their value is

affected by our views as to their origin.

The poverty of language, however, makes it rather difficult to

describe with any exactness the scope of such an inquiry. Beauty is

an ill-defined attribute of certain members of an ill-defined class;

and for the class itself there is no very convenient name. We might

describe its members as “objects of æsthetic interest” always bearing

in mind that this description (as I use it) applies to objects of the

most varying degrees of excellence—to the small as well as the great,

the trifling as well as the sublime: to conjuring and dancing; to

literature, art, and natural beauty.

It follows from this description that, while all things of beauty

possess æsthetic interest, not all things of æsthetic interest would in

common parlance be described as beautiful.[3] They might, for example,

display wit, or finish, or skill. They might, therefore, properly

excite admiration. But beauty is a term whose use may well be confined

to the qualities which excite only the highest forms of æsthetic

interest, and it is thus I propose to employ it.

Now what are the characteristics which distinguish objects of æsthetic

interest from interesting objects generally? I will mention two.

In the first place, the value of æsthetic objects depends on the

intrinsic quality of the emotions they arouse, and not upon the

importance of any ulterior purpose which they may happen to subserve.

In the second place, the emotions themselves, whatever be their value,

must be _contemplative_. They must not prompt to action or reach

forward to any end. They must be self-sufficient, and self-contained.

Of course, I do not suggest that works of art are useless. A building

may be beautiful, although it is also convenient. A sword most

delicately damascened may be an admirable engine of destruction. We may

even go further and admit that utility unadorned may have about it an

æsthetic flavour. Nice adjustment and fitness exquisitely accomplished

are without doubt agreeable objects of contemplation. But, in the

first two of these cases, beauty is deliberately added to utility, not

organically connected with it. An ill-proportioned building might have

been equally fitted for its purpose; a plain sword might have been

equally lethal. In the third case the connection between utility and

æsthetic interest is organic, yet undesigned. From the very nature of

the case it forms no part of the purpose for which the mechanism was

contrived.

Again—when I say that æsthetic interest does not prompt to action,

I am, of course, speaking of those who enjoy, not of those who are

laboriously trying to enjoy, still less of those who create what is to

be enjoyed. It commonly requires effort, conscious and unconscious, to

be a good spectator; it always requires effort to become a good artist.

Yet these are no real exceptions to the principle. Æsthetic interests,

once aroused, do not prompt to action; and it is, I conceive, of their

essence that they should not. The most emotional spectator does not

rush to save Desdemona from Othello; and, though tragedy may (or may

not) purify by “pity and terror,” the pity does not suggest a rescue,

nor the terror urge to flight.

II

Now these characteristics of æsthetic emotions and beliefs raise

problems of great interest. How came they to be what they are? To what

causal process are they due? In the case of ethics (to anticipate a

discussion that will occupy us in the next lecture) the earlier stages

at least are seemingly due to selection. They lead to action, and to

action which has survival value. But what survival value have æsthetic

judgments and feelings at any stage of culture? It is true that

actions which are sometimes represented as primitive forms of artistic

creation play their part in the drama of animal courtship. Some animals

dance, some sing, some croak; some flaunt colours, some exhale smells.

Apes (it seems) make inarticulate noises which (according to Spencer)

were the humble beginnings, not only of speech, but of music. I own

that to me this sort of explanation leaves our æsthetic interests quite

unexplained. Grant, for the sake of argument that, were our knowledge

sufficient, we could trace a continuous history of musical emotions

from the simple satisfaction excited in the female ape by the howling

of the male, down to the delicate delights of the modern musician,

should we be nearer an answer to the problem of æsthetic causation?

I doubt it. Certainly we should not have succeeded in coupling the

development of our feelings for beauty to the general process of

organic evolution. Before this can be satisfactorily accomplished it

must be shown, not merely that the tastes of anthropoid apes are useful

to anthropoid apes, but that the tastes of men are useful to men, and

in particular that the tastes of civilised men are useful to civilised

men. Nor would even this be enough unless usefulness be carefully

defined in terms of survival value. It must, in other words, be shown

that communities rich in the genius which creates beauty and in the

sensibility which enjoys it, will _therefore_ breed more freely and

struggle more successfully than their less gifted neighbours. And I am

not aware that any attempt to establish such a doctrine has ever been

seriously undertaken.

But, if so, our æsthetic sensibilities must be regarded (from the

naturalistic standpoint) as the work of chance. They form no part

of the _quasi_ design which we attribute to selection; they are

unexplained accidents of the evolutionary process. This conclusion

harmonises ill with the importance which civilised man assigns to

them in his scheme of values. On this point, at least, there reigns

a singular unanimity. However people may differ as to what we should

admire, all are agreed that we should admire something. However they

may differ about the benefits to be derived from æsthetic, all are

agreed that the benefits are great. The pessimist finds in art the

solitary mitigation of human miseries. A certain type of agnostic

treats it as an undogmatic substitute for religion. He worships

beauty, but nothing else; and expects from it all the consolations of

religious experience without the burdens of religious belief. Even

those who would refuse to art and literature this exalted position, are

prepared to praise them without stint. They regard the contemplative

study of beautiful things as a most potent instrument of civilisation;

in countless perorations they preach its virtues; delicacy of æsthetic

discrimination they deem the surest proof of culture, and the enjoyment

of æsthetic excellence its highest reward.

The case is apparently, but not really, different when we turn

from beauty to the minor æsthetic interests—the popular novel, the

music-hall song, the cricket-match (as spectacle), the cinematograph,

and so forth. Nobody, it is true, greatly praises these things, but

multitudes greatly enjoy them. The space they occupy in the life of

the community has increased beyond computation. As locomotion becomes

easier and leisure greater that space will increase yet more. This

may be good or bad; but none will deny that it is important. What a

paradox this seems! Theories of selection were devised to explain the

complex structures and the marvellous adjustments of the organic world

without needlessly postulating design. We should think but poorly of

them if they accounted for some organs by methods quite inapplicable

to others—if they showed us, for example, how the eye had developed,

but appealed to some wholly different principle (say special creation)

when they set to work on the ear; or taught that the nose must be

regarded as an evolutionary accident not to be explained on any general

principle at all. If what required explanation was of small biological

importance, this last hypothesis would not seem perhaps startling. The

most convinced selectionist is not obliged to suppose that selection

eliminates everything which does not make for survival. Useless

variations may be spared if they be harmless. Even harmful variations

may be spared if they be linked to variations so advantageous that

their joint effect proves beneficial on balance. But is this the case

with æsthetic? Are we to treat as unconsidered trifles our powers

of enjoying beauty and of creating it? Can we be content with a

world-outlook which assigns to these chance products of matter and

motion so vast a value measured on the scale of culture, and no value

worth counting measured on the scale of race survival? If design may

ever be invoked where selection fails and luck seems incredible, surely

it may be invoked here.

III

These observations are applicable, more or less, to the whole body

of our æsthetic interests—whether they be roused by objects we deem

relatively trivial, or by objects which are admittedly rare and

splendid. But while neither fit comfortably into a purely naturalistic

framework, it is only the second which, in virtue of their intrinsic

quality, demand a source beyond and above the world of sense

perception. Here, then, we are face to face with a new question. So far

we have been concerned to ask whether that which is admittedly valuable

can be plausibly attributed to chance. Now we must ask whether that

which is attributed to chance can thereafter retain its value. Of these

questions the first is germane to the ordinary argument from design. It

is the second which chiefly concerns us in these lectures.

Perhaps an affirmative answer may seem to have been already given by

implication. The admission that the second problem only touches the

highest values in the æsthetic scale may be thought to render the whole

inquiry vain. And the admission cannot be avoided. No one supposes

that when we are looking (for example) at an acrobat, it matters in

the least what we think of the universe. Our beliefs and disbeliefs

about the Cosmic order will not modify either in quantity or quality

such satisfaction as we can derive from the contemplation of his grace

and agility. Where, then, it will be asked, do we reach the point in

the æsthetic scale at which values begin to require metaphysical or

theological postulates? Is it the point where beauty begins? If so, who

determine where this lies; and by what authority do they speak?

Evidently we are here on difficult and delicate ground. On questions

of taste there is notoriously the widest divergence of opinion. Nor,

if we regard our æsthetic interests simply as the chance flotsam and

jetsam of the evolutionary tides, could it well be otherwise. If there

be practically no “limits of deviation” imposed by selection; if,

from a survival point of view, one taste be as good as another, it is

not the varieties in taste which should cause surprise so much as the

uniformities.

To be sure, the uniformities have often no deep æsthetic roots. They

represent no strong specific likes and dislikes shared by all men at

a certain stage of culture, but rather tendencies to agreement (as

I have elsewhere called them), which govern our social ritual, and

thereby make social life possible. We rail at “fashion,” which by an

unfelt compulsion drives multitudes simultaneously to approve the same

dresses, the same plays, the same pictures, the same architecture, the

same music, and the same scenery. We smile at the obsequious zeal with

which men strive to admire what the prophets of the moment assure them

is admirable. But admitting, as I think we must, that these prophets

neither possess any inherent authority, nor can point to any standard

of appeal, we must also admit that if in Art there were no orthodoxies,

if the heresies themselves were unorganised, if every man based his

æsthetic practice on a too respectful consideration of his own moods

and fancies, the world we live in would be even more uncomfortable than

it is.

However this may be, it is clear that this second portion of my

argument, which is not based, like the first, on any objective survey

of the part played in human affairs by general æsthetic interests,

has special difficulties to surmount. For it rests on experiences of

high emotion rare for all, unknown to many, roused in different men

by different objects. How can any conclusions be securely based on

foundations at once so slender and so shifting?

I agree that the values dealt with in this part of the argument are

not values for everybody. Yet everybody, I think, would be prepared

to go some way in the direction I desire. They would acknowledge

that, in art, origin and value cannot be treated as independent.

They would agree that those who enjoy poetry and painting must be at

least dimly aware of a poet beyond the poem and a painter beyond the

picture. If by some unimaginable process works of beauty could be

produced by machinery, as a symmetrical colour pattern is produced by a

kaleidoscope, we might think them beautiful till we knew their origin,

after which we should be rather disposed to describe them as ingenious.

And this is not, I think, because we are unable to estimate works of

art as they are _in themselves_, not because we must needs buttress up

our opinions by extraneous and irrelevant considerations; but rather

because a work of art requires an artist, not merely in the order of

natural causation, but as a matter of æsthetic necessity. It conveys a

message which is valueless to the recipient, unless it be understood by

the sender. It must be expressive.

Such phrases are no doubt easily misunderstood. Let me, therefore,

hasten to add that by an “expressive” message I do not mean a message

which can be expressed in words. A work of art can never be transferred

from one medium into another, as from marble to music. Even when words

are the medium employed, perfect translation is impossible. One poet

may paraphrase, in a different language, the work of another; and a

new work of art may thus be produced. But however closely it follows

the original, it will never be the same. On the other hand, if the

medium used be (for example) colour, or sound, or stone, the work of

art cannot be translated into words at all. It may be described; and

the description may better the original. Yet it cannot replace it. For

every work of art is unique; and its meaning cannot be alternatively

rendered. But are we, therefore, to conclude that it has no meaning?

Because its message cannot be translated, has it therefore no message?

To put these questions is to answer them.

Many people, however, who would travel with me so far would refuse to

go further. They would grant that a work of art must be due to genius,

and not, in the first instance, to mechanism or to chance. But whether,

in the last resort, mechanism or chance has produced the genius, they

would regard as, from the æsthetic point of view, quite immaterial.

Music and poetry must have a personal source. But the musician and the

poet may come whence they will.

And perhaps, in very many cases, this is so; but not, I think, in

all, nor in the highest. If any man will test this for himself, let

him recall the too rare moments when beauty gave him a delight which

strained to its extremest limit his powers of feeling; when not only

the small things of life, but the small things of Art—its technical

dexterities, its historical associations—vanished in the splendour of

an unforgettable vision; and let him ask whether the attribution of

an effect like this to unthinking causes, or to an artist created and

wholly controlled by unthinking causes, would not go far to impair its

value.

To such an appeal it is not difficult to raise objections. It may be

said, for example, that, under the stress of emotions like those I

have described, no man troubles his head about problems of cosmology;

thought is merged in feeling; speculation is smothered. But though this

is true, it is not wholly true. As no pain, I suppose, is so intense

as to exclude all reflections on its probable duration, so no rapture

is so absorbing as to exclude all reflections on its probable source.

I grant that at such moments we do not philosophise; we do not analyse

a problem, turning it this way or that, and noting every aspect of it

with a cool curiosity. Nevertheless, for those accustomed to reflect,

reflection is never wholly choked by feeling. Nor can feeling, in the

long run, be wholly unaffected by reflection.

Again, it may be said that such moments too seldom occur in any man’s

experience to justify even the most modest generalisations—let alone

generalisations that embrace the universe. But this objection seems

to rest on a misapprehension. We must remember that the argument

from æsthetic values is not a scientific induction or a logical

inference. There is here no question of truth and falsehood, or even

of good taste and bad taste. We are not striving to isolate what is

essential to beauty by well-devised experiments; nor are we concerned

with psycho-physical determination of the normal relation between

feeling and stimulus. If it be urged that some particular example

of deep æsthetic emotion quite outruns the merits of its object, so

that sound canons of criticism require its value to be lowered, we

need not deny it. We are not dealing with sound canons of criticism;

though I may observe, in passing, that if they lower emotional values

in one direction without raising them in others, good taste becomes a

somewhat costly luxury. My point is different. I am not appealing to

all men, but only to some men—to those and to those only who, when they

explicitly face the problem, become deeply conscious of the incongruity

between our feelings of beauty and a materialistic account of their

origin.

The extreme individualism of this point of view may seem repulsive to

many. Are the feelings (they will ask) of some transient moment to be

treated as authentic guides through the mysteries of the universe,

merely because they are strong enough to overwhelm our cooler judgment?

And, if so, how far is this method of metaphysical investigation to

be pressed? Are we, for example, to attach transcendental value to

the feelings of a man in love? There is evidently a close, though

doubtless not a perfect, parallel between the two cases. It is true

that love is rooted in appetite, and that appetite has a survival value

which I, at least, cannot find in the purely contemplative emotions.

But romantic love goes far beyond race requirements. From this point of

view it is as useless as æsthetic emotion itself. And, like æsthetic

emotion of the profounder sort, it is rarely satisfied with the

definite, the limited, and the immediate. It ever reaches out towards

an unrealised infinity. It cannot rest content with the prose of mere

fact. It sees visions and dreams dreams which to an unsympathetic world

seem no better than amiable follies. Is it from sources like these—the

illusions of love and the enthusiasms of ignorance—that we propose

to supplement the world-outlook provided for us by sober sense and

scientific observation?

Yet why not? Here we have values which by supposition we are reluctant

to lose. Neither scientific observation nor sober sense can preserve

them. It is surely permissible to ask what will. And if Naturalism be

inimical to their maintenance, the fact should at least be noted.

It is true, no doubt, that these high-wrought feelings have worse

enemies even than naturalism. When the impassioned lover has sunk

into a good husband, and the worshipper of beauty has cooled into a

judicious critic, they may look back on their early raptures with

intelligent disdain. In that event there are for them no values to be

maintained. They were young, they were foolish, they made a mistake,

and there is no more to be said. But there is a higher wisdom. Without

ignoring what experience has to teach, they may still believe that

through these emotions they have obtained an authentic glimpse of a

world more resplendent and not less real than that in which they tramp

their daily round. And, if so, they will attribute to them a value

independent of their immediate cause—a value which cannot be maintained

in a merely naturalistic setting.[4]

This may seem a doctrine too mystical to suit the general tenor of

these lectures. Let me, therefore, hasten to add that our ordinary and

repeatable experiences of beauty seem to point in the same direction

as these rarer and more intense emotions. It is, of course, true that

even about these we cannot generalise as we may (for example) about

the external world. We cannot, I mean, assume that there is a great

body of æsthetic experience which all normal persons possess in common.

There is always something about our feeling for beautiful things

which can neither be described nor communicated, which is unshared

and unshareable. Many normal persons have no such feelings, or none

worth talking about. Their æsthetic interests may be great, but they

lie at a lower level of intensity. They do not really care for beauty.

Again, there are many who do care, and care greatly, who would yet

utterly repudiate the doctrine that the highest æsthetic values were

in any sense dependent on a spiritual view of the universe. The fact

that so much of the greatest art has been produced in the service of

religion they would not regard as relevant. They would remind us that

one great poet at least has been a passionate materialist; that many

have been pessimists; that many have been atheists; that many have been

in violent revolt against the religion of their age and country. Of

these we cannot say that their art suffered from their opinions, for we

cannot imagine what their art would have been like had their opinions

been different. Neither can we say that the readers who shared their

opinions, became, thereby, less qualified to enjoy their art. Such a

paradox would be too violent. How, then (the objectors may ask), are

facts like these to be harmonised with the views I am recommending?

Probably they cannot be harmonised. We are confronted with a difference

of temperament which must be accepted as final. Yet the contradiction

may often be less than at first appears. In the case which I brought

forward just now, strong æsthetic emotion was assumed to carry with

it, both at the crisis of immediate experience and yet more in periods

of reflective retrospect, a demand for some cause emotionally adequate

to its effect. In other words, it was assumed that such an experience

suggested the question—whence comes it? of matter? or of spirit? and

required the answer—if it be not born of spirit it is little, or it is

naught.

But in many cases this answer is not given because the question is not

asked; or, if it be asked, is misunderstood. And there are many reasons

why it should not be asked; and many why it should be misunderstood.

For there are two things which must, in this connection, be remembered.

The first is that materialism has never been the prevailing creed

among lovers of beauty. The second is that though (as I contend) a

deep-lying incongruity infects theories which trace the ultimate

genesis of beauty exclusively to causes which neither think, nor feel,

nor will, such theories involve no contradiction, nor can those who

hold them be taxed with inconsistency. There is, therefore, little

in the ordinary routine of artistic criticism which raises the point

which we are now discussing. A critic examining some artistic whole—a

picture, a poem, a symphony—is much occupied in separating out the

elements which contribute to the total effect, and in observing their

character, value, and mutual relations. But it is only when we cease to

analyse, when we contemplate, directly or in retrospect, the whole _as_

a whole, that the problem of origin arises; and even then it need never

become explicit. It may remain in the shape of an unsatisfied longing

for a spiritual reality beyond the sensuous impression, or of a vaguely

felt assurance that the spiritual reality is there. And in neither case

has it developed into a question definitely presented—and pressing for

a definite reply.

While, then, I am quite ready to believe that there are many persons

whose enjoyment of beauty is quite independent of their world outlook,

I am also convinced that there are some who count themselves among

the number only because they have never put the matter to the proof.

It may be that they have given but little thought to questions of

theology or metaphysics. It may be that they are pantheists after the

manner of Shelley, or pessimists after the manner of Schopenhauer.

Perhaps, again, they hold one or other of the theosophies which pass

current in the West as the esoteric wisdom of the East. In any case,

they are averse from orthodoxy, or what they regard as such. A lover of

the beautiful belonging to any type like these, if asked whether his

estimate of æsthetic values depended on his creed, might easily miss

the point of the inquiry, and his negative reply would be worthless.

Let the question, therefore, be put in different terms. Let him be

asked whether beauty would not lose value for him if his world-outlook

required him to regard it as a purposeless accident; whether the

æsthetic delights which he deems most exquisite would not be somewhat

dimmed if reflection showed them to be as vain, as transitory, though

not so useful, as the least considered pleasures of sense. If he

replies in the negative, there is no more to be said. This lecture

is not addressed to him. But I believe there are many to whom such

an answer would be profoundly unsatisfying; and they, at least, can

hardly deny that æsthetic values are in part dependent upon a spiritual

conception of the world we live in.

IV

So far I have been considering art and the beauty expressed by art. But

there are two kinds of æsthetic interest, which, though not artistic in

the ordinary sense of the word, are so important that something must be

said about them before this lecture closes.

The first of these is natural beauty. Hegel, if I rightly understand

him, altogether excluded this from the sphere of æsthetic. For him the

point of importance was Spirit—the Idea—expressing itself in art; and

since nature is not spirit, nor natural beauty art, the exclusion was

logical. For me, on the other hand, the main thing is feeling roused by

contemplation; and particularly feeling at its highest level of quality

and intensity. Natural beauty, therefore, cannot be ignored; since no

feelings of contemplation possess higher quality, or greater intensity,

than those which natural beauty can arouse.

Evidently, however, there is, even from my point of view, a great

difference between beauty in art and beauty in nature. For, in the

case of nature, there is no artist; while, as I observed just now, “a

work of art requires an artist, not merely in the order of natural

causation, but in the order of æsthetic necessity. It conveys a message

which is valueless to the recipient unless it be understood by the

sender. It must be significant.”

Are we, then, to lay down one rule for artistic beauty and another rule

for natural beauty? Must the first be expressive, but not the second?

Is creative mind necessary in one case, and superfluous in the other?

And if in the case of nature it be necessary, where is it to be found?

On the naturalistic hypothesis, it is not to be found at all. The glory

of mountain and of plain, storm and sunshine, must be regarded as

resembling the kaleidoscopic pattern of which I just now spoke; with

this difference only—that the kaleidoscope was designed to give _some_

pattern, though no one pattern more than another; while nature was not

designed with any intention at all, and gives us its patterns only by

accident.

I know not whether you will think that this train of thought is helped

or hindered by bringing it into relation with our scientific knowledge

of natural realities. The world which stirs our æsthetic emotions is

the world of sense, the world as it appears. It is not the world as

science asks us to conceive it. This is very ill-qualified to afford

æsthetic delight of the usual type; although the contemplation of

complicated relations reduced to law may produce an intellectual

pleasure in the nature of æsthetic interest. Yet none, I think, would

maintain that mass and motion abstractly considered, nor any concrete

arrangement of moving atoms or undulating ether, are beautiful as

represented in thought, or would be beautiful could they become objects

of perception. We have a bad habit of saying that science deals with

nothing but “phenomena.” If by phenomena are meant appearances, it

is to æsthetics rather than to science that, on the principle of

Solomon’s judgment, phenomena most properly belong. To get away from

appearances, to read the physical fact behind its sensuous effect, is

one chief aim of science; while to put the physical fact in place of

its sensuous effect would be the total and immediate ruin of beauty

both in nature and in the arts which draw on nature for their material.

Natural beauty, in other words, would perish if physical reality and

physical appearance became one, and we were reduced to the lamentable

predicament of perceiving nature as nature is!

Now, to me, it seems that the feeling for natural beauty cannot, any

more than scientific curiosity, rest satisfied with the world of

sensuous appearance. But the reasons for its discontent are different.

Scientific curiosity hungers for a knowledge of causes; causes which

are physical, and, if possible, measurable. Our admiration for natural

beauty has no such needs. It cares not to understand either the

physical theories which explain what it admires, or the psychological

theories which explain its admiration. It does not deny the truth of

the first, nor (within due limits) the sufficiency of the second. But

it requires more. It feels itself belittled unless conscious purpose

can be found somewhere in its pedigree. Physics and psycho-physics, by

themselves, suffice not. It longs to regard beauty as a revelation—a

revelation from spirit to spirit, not from one kind of atomic agitation

to the “psychic” accompaniment of another. On this condition only can

its highest values be maintained.[5]

V

There is yet one other subject of æsthetic interest on which I desire

to say something before the course of these lectures carries me into

very different regions of speculation. The subject I refer to is

history.

That history has æsthetic value is evident. An age which is both

scientific and utilitarian occasionally pretends to see in it no more

than the raw material of a science called sociology, and a storehouse

of precedents from which statesmen may draw maxims for the guidance of

mankind. It may be all this, but it is certainly more. What has in the

main caused history to be written, and when written to be eagerly read,

is neither its scientific value nor its practical utility, but its

æsthetic interest. Men love to contemplate the performances of their

fellows, and whatever enables them to do so, whether we belittle it as

gossip or exalt it as history, will find admirers in abundance.

Yet the difference between this subject of contemplative interest and

those provided either by beauty in art or beauty in nature are striking.

In the first place, history is not concerned to express beauty. I do

not deny that a great historian, in narrating some heroic incident,

may rival the epic and the saga. He may tell a tale which would be

fascinating even if it were false. But such cases are exceptional,

and ought to be exceptional. Directly it appears that the governing

preoccupation of an historian is to be picturesque, his narrative

becomes intolerable.

This is because the interest—I mean the _æsthetic_ interest—of history

largely depends upon its accuracy; or (more strictly) upon its supposed

accuracy. Fictitious narrative, whether realistic or romantic, may

suggest deeper truths, may tell us more about the heart of man,

than all the histories that ever were written; and may tell it more

agreeably. But fact has an interest, because it is fact; because it

actually happened; because actual people who really lived and really

suffered and really rejoiced caused it to happen, or were affected by

its happening. And on this interest the charm of history essentially

depends.

In this respect there is, I think, a certain analogy between the

æsthetic interest aroused by history and that aroused by natural

beauty. Our pleasure in a landscape is qualified if we discover

ourselves to have been the victims of an optical delusion. If, for

example, purple peaks are seen on a far horizon, the traveller may

exclaim, “What beautiful mountains!” Something thereupon convinces him

that the mountains are but clouds, and his delight suffers an immediate

chill. But why? The mountains, it is true, proved unreal; but they had

as much reality as mountains in a picture. Where lies the essential

difference between a representation accidentally produced by condensed

vapour and a representation deliberately embodied in paint and canvas?

It is not to be found, as might be at first supposed, in the fact

that the one deceives us and the other does not. Were we familiar with

this particular landscape, did we know that nothing but a level plain

stretched before us to the limits of our vision, we might still feel

that, if the clouds on the horizon were what they seemed to be, the

view would gain greatly in magnificence. Here there is no deception and

no shock of disillusionment. If, therefore, we remain dissatisfied, it

is because in this case verisimilitude does not suffice us; we insist

on facts.

It has, perhaps, not been sufficiently noticed that brute fact, truth

as it is apprehended in courts of law, truth as it is given by an

accurate witness speaking on oath, has for some purposes great æsthetic

value. That it is all-important in the dealings between man and man

would be universally conceded; that it has no importance either in fine

art or imaginative literature, and no meaning in music or architecture,

most people would be ready to admit. But that it possesses worth

where no practical issues are involved, and that this worth is of the

contemplative or æsthetic order, is perhaps not so easy of acceptance.

Yet so it is. A tale which would be inexpressibly tedious if we thought

it was (in the “law court” sense) false may become of absorbing

interest if we think it true. And this not because it touches morals

or practice, not because it has theoretic interest or controversial

importance, but in its own right and on its own merits.

Now this æsthetic quality is, it seems to me, required both from

“natural beauty” and historic narrative; but if there is here a

resemblance between them, in other respects they are profoundly

different. Landscape appeals to us directly. I do not mean that our

enjoyment of it, both in quality and quantity, is not largely due to

the work of artists. Our tastes have, no doubt, been formed and our

sensibilities educated by the interpretation of nature which we owe to

painters and poets. But though this is true, it is also true that what

we see and what we enjoy is not art but nature, nature at first hand,

nature seen immediately, if not as she is, at least as she appears. In

the case of history it is otherwise. Except when we happen to have been

ourselves spectators of important events, there is always an artist to

be reckoned with. It may be Thucydides. It may be Dr. Dryasdust. It may

be a mediæval chronicler. It may be Mrs. Candour at the tea-table. But

there is always somebody; and though that somebody might repudiate

the notion that his narrative was a work of art, yet he cannot evade

responsibility for selection, for emphasis, and for colour. We may

think him a bad artist, but, even in his own despite, an artist he

is;—an artist whose material is not marble or sound, but brute fact.

There is another way in which the æsthetic interest of history

characteristically differs from the interest we feel in beauty, whether

of art or of nature. It is massive rather than acute. Particular

episodes may indeed raise the most poignant emotions. But, broadly

speaking, the long-drawn story of man and his fortunes stirs feelings

which (to borrow a metaphor from physics) are great in quantity but of

low intensity. So it comes about that, whereas in the case of art the

emotions stand out prominently above their associated judgments, in the

case of history the positions are commonly reversed.

Yet this need not be so; and in particular it need not be so when we

are contemplating the historical process as a whole. Details are then

merged in a general impression; and the general impression drives us

beyond the limits of history proper into questions of origin and

purpose, into reflections about man and destiny, into problems of

whence and whither. Speculations like these have an emotional as well

as an intellectual value, which must be affected by the answers we give

them.

Let me illustrate and explain. It is possible, indeed it is easy, to

contemplate aspects of history with the coolest intellectual interest.

In this mood we might, for instance, study the development of science

and religion out of primitive magics and superstitions. In this mood

we might observe the characteristics of the city state, or the growth

and decay of feudalism, or the history of the Mongols. On the other

hand, the interest often becomes tinged with stronger feelings when we

sympathetically follow the changing fortunes of particular individuals

or communities. We are then, as it were, spectators of a drama, moved

by dramatic hopes and fears, dramatic likes and dislikes, dramatic

“pity and terror.” And our emotions are not merely those appropriate to

drama; they have, besides, that special quality (already referred to)

which depends on the belief that they are occasioned by real events in

a world of real people.

But there is yet a third case to be considered, in which the two

previous cases are included and partially submerged. This occurs when

the object of our contemplative interest is not episodic but general,

not the fate of this man or that nation, this type of polity or that

stage of civilisation, but the fate of mankind itself, its past and

future, its collective destiny.

Now we may, if we please, treat this as no more than a chapter of

natural history. Compared with the chapter devoted, let us say, to the

Dinosaurs it no doubt has the disadvantage of being as yet unfinished,

for the Dinosaurs are extinct, and man still survives. On the other

hand, though the natural history of “Homo Sapiens” is incomplete, we

may admit that it possesses a peculiar interest for the biologist; but

this interest is scientific, not historical.

For what does historical interest require? Not merely “brute fact,” but

brute fact about beings who are more than animals, who look before and

after, who dream about the past and hope about the future, who plan and

strive and suffer for ends of their own invention; for ideals which

reach far beyond the appetites and fears which rule the lives of their

brother beasts. Such beings have a “natural history,” but it is not

with this that we are concerned. The history which concerns us is the

history of self-conscious personalities, and of communities which are

(in a sense) self-conscious also. Can the contemplative values which

this possesses, especially in its most comprehensive shape, be regarded

as independent of our world-outlook? Surely not.

Observe that history, so conceived, must needs compare faculty with

desire, achievement with expectation, fulfilment with design. And no

moralist has ever found pleasure in the comparison. The vanity of

human wishes and the brevity of human life are immemorial themes of

lamentation; nor do they become less lamentable when we extend our

view from the individual to the race. Indeed, it is much the other

way. Men’s wishes are not always vain, nor is every life too brief

to satisfy its possessor. Only when we attempt, from the point of

view permitted by physics and biology, to sum up the possibilities

of collective human endeavour, do we fully realise the “vanity of

vanities” proclaimed by the Preacher.

I am not, of course, suggesting that history is uninteresting because

men are unhappy: nor yet that naturalism carries pessimism in its

train. It may well be that if mankind could draw up a hedonistic

balance-sheet, the pleasures of mundane existence would turn out to

be greater than its sufferings. But this is not the question. I am not

(for the moment) concerned with the miseries of the race, but with its

futility. Its miseries might be indefinitely diminished, yet leave its

futility unchanged. We might live without care and die without pain;

nature, tamed to our desires, might pour every luxury into our lap;

and, with no material wish unsatisfied, we might contemplate at our

ease the inevitable, if distant, extinction of all the life, feeling,

thought, and effort whose reality is admitted by a naturalistic creed.

But how should we be advanced? What interest would then be left in the

story of the human race from its sordid beginnings to its ineffectual

end? Poets and thinkers of old dimly pictured a controlling Fate

to which even the Olympian gods were subject. The unknown power,

which they ignorantly worshipped, any text-book on physics will now

declare unto you. But no altars are erected in its honour. Its name

is changed. It is no longer called Fate or Destiny, but is known by a

title less august if more precise, the law of energy-degradation, or

(if you please) “the second law of thermo-dynamics.” It has become

the subject of scientific experiment; the physicists have taken it

over from the seers, and its attributes are defined in equations. All

terrestrial life is in revolt against it; but to it, in the end, must

all terrestrial life succumb. Eschatology, the doctrine of the last

things, has lapsed from prophecy to calculation, and has become (at

least potentially) a quantitative science.

And, from a scientific point of view, this is quite satisfactory. But

it is not satisfactory when we are weighing the æsthetic values of

universal history. Shakespeare, in the passionate indictment of life

which he puts into the mouth of Macbeth, declares it to be “a tale

told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,” and (mark well the climax)

“_signifying nothing_.” That is the point with which in this lecture

we are chiefly concerned. It most clearly emerges when, in moments of

reflection, we enlarge the circuit of our thoughts beyond the needs of

action, and, in a mood untouched by personal hopes or fears, endeavour

to survey man’s destiny as a whole. Till a period within the memory

of men now living it was possible to credit terrestrial life with

an infinite future, wherein there was room for an infinite approach

towards some, as yet, unpictured perfection. It could always be hoped

that human efforts would leave behind them some enduring traces, which,

however slowly, might accumulate without end. But hopes like these are

possible no more. The wider is the sweep of our contemplative vision

the more clearly do we see that the rôle of man, if limited to an

earthly stage, is meaningless and futile;—that, however it be played,

in the end it “signifies nothing.” Will any one assert that universal

history can maintain its interest undimmed if steeped in the atmosphere

of a creed like this?

Here, however, we are evidently nearing the frontier which divides

æsthetic from ethic. Before I cross it, and begin a new subject, let me

very briefly touch on a difficulty which may have occurred to some of

my hearers.

The line of thought followed in the last section of this lecture

assumes, or seems to assume, that our only choice lies between history

framed in a naturalistic, and history framed in a theistic, setting. In

the first case we have a world-outlook which forbids the attribution

of permanent value to human effort; in the second case we have a

world-outlook which requires, or, at the least, permits it. But are

these the only alternatives? What are we to say, for example, about

those metaphysical religions which, whether they be described as

theistic, pantheistic, or atheistic, agree in regarding all life as

illusion, all desire as wretchedness, and deem the true end of man to

be absorption in the timeless identity of the real? Such creeds have no

affinity with naturalism. Philosophically they are in sharpest contrast

to it. But even less than naturalism do they provide history with a

suitable setting. For naturalism does, after all, leave untouched the

interest of historical episodes, so long as they are considered out of

relation to the whole of which they form a part. As we are content, in

the realm of fiction, to bid farewell to the hero and heroine on their

marriage, unmoved by anxieties about their children, so, in the realm

of “brute fact,” we may arbitrarily isolate any period we choose, and

treat the story of it without reference to any theories concerning the

future destiny of man. But this process of abstraction must surely be

useless for those who think of the world in terms of the metaphysical

religions to which I have referred. In their eyes all effort is

inherently worthless, all desire inherently vain. Nor would they change

their opinion even were they persuaded that progress was real and

unending; that effort and desire were building up, however slowly, an

imperishable polity of super-men. For those who in this spirit face the

struggling world of common experience the contemplative interest of

universal history must be small indeed.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] I greatly regret having to stretch the ordinary meaning of the word

“æsthetic” to the extent required by the argument of this chapter. I

got into trouble in a previous work by the extension I gave to the word

“Authority.” And as, in that case, no explanation seemed sufficient to

avoid misconception, so I am afraid it will be in the present case.

But what better course is open to me? I require a word to express a

concept which is vital to the doctrines I am preaching. Where am I to

get it? If there is no such word in ordinary use, I must either invent

a new word, or I must modify the familiar meaning of an old word. There

are objections to both courses; yet one of them must be taken. I have

chosen the second; and can do no more than ask for the indulgence of

those readers who think I should have chosen the first.

[4] Cf. Plato in the “Phædrus.”

[5] It is perhaps to this tendency we may (in part) attribute the

eagerness with which poetry and fine art have used and abused the

personifications of natural objects provided for them by primitive

superstition. If not, it is curious that these tedious mythologies

should have been cherished by poets long after they were abandoned by

everybody else; and that we still use every expedient for endowing

material nature with fictitious sympathies and powers. But it is, I

think, an error to see nothing in such metaphors but a trick of style.

They represent the same deep-rooted tendency which finds significance

in such phrases as “Mother Earth,” which has suggested certain

poetic forms of Pantheism; or which gathers a vague, semi-spiritual

consolation from the thought that, when we die, our bodies, resolved

into their elements, may still share in the new manifestations of life

which Nature (half personified) pours out in exhaustless profusion.

LECTURE IV

ETHICS AND THEISM

I

I turn now from contemplation to action; from Æsthetics to Ethics.

And in so doing I must ask permission to stretch the ordinary meaning

of the term which I use to describe the subject-matter of the present

lecture, as I have already stretched the meaning of the term which

described the subject-matter of the last. “Æsthetics” there included

much besides beauty; “Ethics” here will include much besides morality.

As, under the first head, were ranged contemplative interests far lower

in the scale than (for example) those of art, so I shall extend the

use of the word “Ethics” till it embraces the whole range of what used

to be called the “springs of action,” from the loftiest love down to

impulses which in themselves are non-moral, instinctive, even automatic.

The grounds for this procedure are similar in both cases. I am mainly,

almost exclusively, concerned with beliefs and emotions touching

beauty and goodness. Yet it is important to remember that, considered

as natural products, these shade off by insensible gradations into

manifestations of life to which the words “belief” and “emotion” are

quite inapplicable, where “beauty” and “goodness” have little meaning

or none. And as this larger class, when concerned with action, has at

present no better name, I may be permitted to describe it as ethical.

I am mainly concerned, however, with that higher part of the ethical

scale which all would agree to call Moral, and with the debatable

region immediately below it. Of purposive action, or what seems to be

such, of a still lower type, I need say little—but we must never forget

that it is there.

Morals, as I conceive them, are concerned with ends of action: and

principally with _ultimate_ ends of action. An end of action, in so far

as it is ultimate, is one which is pursued for itself alone, and not as

a means to some other end. Of course an end may be, and constantly is,

both ultimate and contributory. It is sought for on its own account,

and also as an instrument for procuring something else. It is mainly

in the first of these capacities, however, that it concerns morality.

For the purposes of this lecture I shall classify ultimate ends as

either egoistic or altruistic—egoistic ends being those that are

immediately connected with, or centred in, the agent; altruistic

ends being those that are not. But I beg you to remember that this

distinction does not correspond to that between right and wrong. Egoism

is not necessarily vicious, nor is altruism necessarily virtuous.

Indeed, as I shall have occasion to point out later, the blackest

vices, such as cruelty and hatred, are often altruistic.

This is an unusual, though not, I think, an unreasonable, use of

language. “Egoism” and “altruism” are terms historically associated

with the moral theories which regard happiness as the only end of

action, but are under the necessity of distinguishing between actions

designed to secure the happiness of the agent and actions designed to

secure the happiness of other people. I do not accept these theories,

though I borrow their phraseology. Happiness may, or may not, be the

highest of all ultimate ends, the one to which all others should give

way. But it seems to me quite misleading to call it the only one.

To describe the sensual man, the vain man, the merely selfish man,

the miser, the ascetic, the man moved by rational self-love, the man

absorbed in the task of “self-realisation,” the man consumed by the

passion for posthumous fame, as all pursuing the same egoistic end

by different means, is surely to confuse distinctions of great moral

importance without any gain of scientific clarity. In like manner,

to suppose that the man who spends himself in the service (say) of

his family, his country, or his church, is only striving for the

“happiness” of the human race, or of certain selected members of the

human race, is (it seems to me) to ignore the plain teaching of daily

experience. As there are many egoistic ends besides our own happiness,

so there are many altruistic ends besides the happiness of others.

The extended sense, therefore, in which I employ these terms seems

justified by facts.

II

I shall not attempt to determine the point at which we can first

clearly discriminate between the “egoistic” and “altruistic” elements

in animal instinct. Evidently, however, it is anterior to and

independent of any conceptual recognition either of an _ego_ or an

_alter_. It might be argued that there is an altruistic element in the

most egoistic instincts. Eating, multiplying, fighting, and running

away—acts plainly directed towards preserving and satisfying the

individual—also conduce to the preservation of the race. But, however

this may be, the converse is certainly untrue. There are altruistic

instincts into which no element of egoism enters. Of these the most

important is parental, especially maternal, love: the most amazing

are the impulses which regulate the complex polity of (for example) a

hive of bees. In these cases one organism will work or fight or endure

for others: it will sacrifice its life for its offspring, or for the

commonwealth of which it is a member. Egoism is wholly lost in altruism.

Now, I suppose that, in the order of causation, all these animal

instincts, be they egoistic or altruistic, must be treated as

contrivances for aiding a species in the struggle for existence.

If _anything_ be due to selection, surely _these_ must be. This is

plainly true of the egoistic appetites and impulses on which depend

the maintenance of life and its propagation. It must also be true of

the altruistic instincts. Take, for instance, the case of parental

devotion. Its survival value is clearly immense. The higher animals, as

at present constituted, could not exist without it; and though, for all

we can say to the contrary, development might have followed a different

course, and a race not less effectively endowed than man might flourish

though parental care played no greater part in the life-history of its

members than it does in the life-history of a herring, yet this is

not what has actually happened. Altruistic effort, in the world as we

know it, is as essential to the higher organisms as the self-regarding

instincts and appetites are to organic life in general; and there seems

no reason for attributing to it a different origin.

Can this be said with a like confidence about the higher portions of

the ethical scale? Are these also due to selection?

Evidently the difference between primitive instincts and developed

morality is immense; and it is as great in the egoistic as in the

non-egoistic region of ethics. Ideals of conduct, the formulation of

ends, judgments of their relative worth, actions based on principles,

deliberate choice between alternative policies, the realised

distinction between the self and other personalities or other centres

of feeling— all these are involved in developed morality, while in

animal ethics they exist not at all, or only in the most rudimentary

forms.

Compare, for instance, a society of bees and a society of men. In both

there is division of labour; in both there is organised effort towards

an end which is other and greater than the individual good of any

single member of the community. But though there are these deep-lying

resemblances between the two cases, how important are the differences

which divide them! In the bee-hive altruism is obeyed, but not chosen.

Alternative ends are not contrasted. No member of the community thinks

that it could do something different from, and more agreeable than, the

inherited task. Nor in truth could it. General interest and individual

interest are never opposed, for they are never distinguished. The agent

never compares, and therefore never selects.

Far different are the ethical conditions requiring consideration

when we turn from bees to men. Here egoism and altruism are not only

distinguished in reflection; they may be, and often are, incompatible

in practice. Nor does this conflict of ends only show itself _between_

these two great ethical divisions; it is not less apparent _within_

them. Here, then, we find ourselves in a world of moral conflict very

faintly foreshadowed in animal ethics. For us, ultimate ends are many.

They may reinforce each other, or they may weaken each other. They may

harmonise, or they may clash. Personal ends may prove incompatible with

group ends: one group end may prove incompatible with another. Loyalty

may be ranged against loyalty, altruism against altruism; nor is there

any court of appeal which can decide between them.

But there are yet other differences between the ethics of instinct

and the ethics of reflection. Instincts are (relatively) definite and

stable; they move in narrow channels; they cannot easily be enlarged

in scope, or changed in character. The animal mother, for example,

cares for its young children, but never for its young grandchildren.

The lifelong fidelity of the parent birds in certain species (a

fidelity seemingly independent of the pairing season, or the care of

particular broods) never becomes the nucleus of a wider association.

Altruistic instincts may lead to actions which equal, or surpass,

man’s highest efforts of abnegation; but the actions are matters of

routine, and the instincts never vary. They emerge in the same form at

the same stage of individual growth, like any other attribute of the

species—its colour, for instance, or its claws. And if they be, like

colour and claws, the products of selection, this is exactly what we

should expect. But then, if the loyalties of man be also the product of

selection, why do they not show a similar fixity?

Plainly they do _not_. Man inherits the capacity for loyalty, but not

the use to which he shall put it. The persons and causes (if any) to

which he shall devote himself are suggested to him, often, indeed,

imposed upon him, by education and environment. Nevertheless, they are

his by choice, not by hereditary compulsion. And his choice may be bad.

He may unselfishly devote himself to what is petty or vile, as he may

to what is generous and noble. But on the possibility of error depends

the possibility of progress; and if (to borrow a phrase from physics)

our loyalty possessed as few “degrees of freedom” as that of ants or

bees, our social organisation would be as rigid.

The most careless glance at the pages of history, or the world of

our own experience, will show how varied are the forms in which this

capacity for loyalty is displayed. The Spartans at Thermopylæ,

the “Blues” and the “Greens” at Byzantium, rival politicians in a

hard-fought election, players and spectators at an Eton and Harrow

Match, supply familiar illustrations of its variety and vigour. And do

not suppose that in thus bringing together the sublime, the familiar,

and the trivial, I am paradoxically associating matters essentially

disparate. This is not so. I am not putting on a moral level the

patriot and the partisan, the martyr to some great cause and the

shouting spectator at a school match. What I am insisting on is that

they all have loyalty in common; a loyalty which often is, and always

may be, pure from egoistic alloy.

Loyalties, then, which are characteristically human differ profoundly

from those which are characteristically animal. The latter are due to

instincts which include both the end to be sought for and the means by

which it is to be attained. The former are rooted in a general capacity

for, or inclination to, loyalty, with little inherited guidance either

as to ends or means. Yet, if we accept selection as the source of

the first, we can hardly reject it as the source of the second. For

the survival value of loyalty is manifest. It lies at the root of

all effective co-operation. Without it the family and tribe would be

impossible; and without the family and the tribe, or some yet higher

organisation, men, if they could exist at all, would be more helpless

than cattle, weak against the alien forces of nature, at the mercy of

human foes more capable of loyalty than themselves. A more powerful aid

in the struggle for existence cannot easily be imagined.

We are indeed apt to forget how important are its consequences, even

when it supplies no more than a faint qualification of other and more

obvious motives. It acts like those alloys which, in doses relatively

minute, add strength and elasticity even to steel. The relation (for

example) between a commercial company and its officials is essentially

a business one. The employer pays the market price for honesty and

competence, and has no claim to more. Yet that company is surely either

unfortunate or undeserving whose servants are wholly indifferent to

its fortunes, feeling no faintest flicker of pride when it succeeds,

no tinge of regret when it fails. Honourable is the tie between those

who exchange honest wage and honest work; yet loyalty can easily better

it. And a like truth is manifest in spheres of action less reputable

than those of commerce. Mercenaries, to be worth hiring, must be partly

moved by forces higher than punishment or pay. Even pirates could not

plunder with profit were their selfishness unredeemed by some slight

tincture of reciprocal loyalty.

There are, however, many who would admit the occasional importance of

loyalty while strenuously denying that social life was wholly based

upon it. For them society is an invention; of all inventions the most

useful, but still only an invention. It was (they think) originally

devised by individuals in their individual interest; and, though

common action was the machinery employed, personal advantage was the

end desired. By enlightened egoism social organisation was created;

by enlightened egoism it is maintained and improved. Contrivance,

therefore, not loyalty, is the master faculty required.

This is a great delusion—quite unsupported by anything we know or can

plausibly conjecture about the history of mankind. No one, indeed,

doubts that deliberate adaptation of means to ends has helped to

create, and is constantly modifying, human societies; nor yet that

egoism has constantly perverted political and social institutions to

merely private uses. But there is something more fundamental to be

borne in mind, namely, that without loyalty there would be no societies

to modify, and no institutions to pervert. If these were merely

well-designed instruments like steam-engines and telegraphs, they would

be worthless. They would perish at the first shock, did they not at

once fall into ruin by their own weight. If they are to be useful as

means, they must first impose themselves as ends; they must possess

a quality beyond the reach of contrivance: the quality of commanding

disinterested service and uncalculating devotion.

III

I should therefore be ready to admit, as a plausible conjecture, that

the capacity for altruistic emotions and beliefs is a direct product

of organic evolution; an attribute preserved and encouraged, because

it is useful to the race, and transmitted from parents to offspring

by physiological inheritance. On this theory loyalty in some shape

or other is as natural to man as maternal affection is natural to

mammals. Doubtless it is more variable in strength, more flexible in

direction, more easily smothered by competing egoisms; but the capacity

for it is not less innate, and not less necessary in the struggle for

existence. But when we ask how far selection has been responsible for

the development of high altruistic ideals out of primitive forms of

loyalty, we touch on problems of much greater complexity. Evidently

there has been a profound moral transformation in the course of ages.

None suppose that ethical values are appraised in the twentieth century

as they were in the first stone age. But what has caused the change is

not so clear.

There are obvious, and, I think, insurmountable difficulties in

attributing it to organic selection. Selection is of the fittest—of

the fittest to survive. But in what consists this particular kind of

fitness? The answer from the biological point of view is quite simple:

almost a matter of definition. That race is “fit” which maintains

its numbers; and that race is fittest which most increases them. The

judge of such “fitness” is not the moralist or the statesman. It is

the Registrar-General. So little is “fitness” inseparably attached to

excellence, that it would be rash to say that there is any quality,

however unattractive, which might not in conceivable circumstances

assist survival. High authorities, I believe, hold that at this moment

in Britain we have so managed matters that congenital idiots increase

faster than any other class of the population. If so, they must be

deemed the “fittest” of our countrymen. No doubt this fact, if it be

a fact, is an accident of our social system. Legislation has produced

this happy adaptation of environment to organism, and legislation might

destroy it. The fittest to-day might become the unfittest to-morrow.

But this is nothing to the purpose. That part of man’s environment

which is due to man does no doubt usually vary more quickly than the

part which is due to nature; none the less is it environment in the

strictest sense of the word. The theory of selection draws no essential

distinction between (say) the secular congelation of a continent in

the ice age, and the workings of the English Poor Law in the twentieth

century. It is enough that each, while it lasts, favours or discourages

particular heritable variations, and modifies the qualities that make

for “survival.”

What is more important, however, than the fact that heritable “fitness”

may be completely divorced from mental and moral excellence, is the

fact that so large a part of man’s mental and moral characteristics are

not heritable at all, and cannot therefore be directly due to organic

selection. Races may accumulate accomplishments, yet remain organically

unchanged. They may learn and they may forget, they may rise from

barbarism to culture, and sink back from culture to barbarism, while

through all these revolutions the raw material of their humanity

varies never a bit. In such cases there can be no question of Natural

Selection in the sense in which biologists use the term.

And there are other considerations which suggest that, as development

proceeds, the forces of organic selection diminish. While man was in

the making we may easily believe that those possessing no congenital

instinct for loyalty failed, and that failure involved elimination.

In such circumstances, the hereditary instinct would become an

inbred characteristic of the race. But in a civilised, or even in

a semi-civilised, world, the success of one competitor has rarely

involved the extinction of the other—at least by mere slaughter. When

extinction has followed defeat, it has been due rather to the gradual

effects of disease and hardship, or to other causes more obscure, but

not less deadly. The endless struggles between tribes, cities, nations,

and races, have in the main been struggles for domination, not for

existence. Slavery, not death, has been the penalty of failure; and

if domination has produced a change in the inherited type, it is not

because the conquered has perished before the conqueror, but because,

conquest having brought them together, the two have intermarried.

There is thus no close or necessary connection between biological

“fitness” and military or political success. The beaten race, whose

institutions or culture perish, may be the race which in fact survives;

while victors who firmly establish their language, religion, and polity

may, after a few centuries, leave scarce a trace behind them of any

heritable characteristics which the anthropologist is able to detect.

This observation, however, suggests a new point. Is there not, you may

ask, a “struggle for existence” between non-heritable acquirements

which faintly resembles the biological struggle between individuals

or species? Religious systems, political organisations, speculative

creeds, industrial inventions, national policies, scientific

generalisations, and (what specially concerns us now) ethical ideals,

are in perpetual competition and conflict. Some maintain themselves

or expand. These are, by definition, the “fit.” Some wane or perish.

These are, by definition, the unfit. Here we find selection, survival,

elimination; and, though we see them at work in quite other regions of

reality than those explored by the student of organic evolution, the

analogy between the two cases is obvious.

But is the analogy more than superficial? Is it relevant to our present

argument? Can it explain either the spread of higher moral ideals or

their development? Let us consider for a moment some examples of this

psychological “struggle for existence.” Take, as a simple case, the

competition between rival inventions—between the spinning-jenny and the

hand-loom, the breech-loader and the muzzle-loader, pre-Listerian and

post-Listerian methods of surgery. Unless the environment be strongly

charged with prejudice, ignorance, or sinister interests, the “fittest”

in such cases is that which best serves its purpose. Measurable

efficiency is the quality which wins. But this supplies us with no

useful analogy when we are dealing with ethics. Morality, as I have

already insisted, is not an invention designed to serve an external

purpose. The “struggle for existence” between higher and lower ethical

ideals has no resemblance to the struggle between the spinning-jenny

and the hand-loom. It is a struggle between ends, not between means.

Efficiency is not in question.

A like observation applies to that quality of our beliefs which might

be described as “argumentative plausibility.” This is to abstract

theorising what efficiency is to practical invention. It has survival

value. Both, of course, are relative terms, whose application varies

with circumstances. An invention is only efficient while the commodity

it produces is in demand. A theory is only plausible while it hits off

the intellectual temper of the day. But if efficiency and plausibility

be thus understood, the more efficient invention and the more plausible

doctrine will oust their less favoured rivals. They are the “fittest.”

But as morality is not a means, so neither is it a conclusion. Whatever

be its relation to Reason, _reasoning_ can never determine the

essential nature of its contents. Plausibility, therefore, is no more

in question than efficiency.

I do not, of course, deny that ethics are always under discussion,

or that the basis of moral rules and their application are themes of

unending controversy. This is plainly true. But it is also true that

there is no argumentative method of shaking any man’s allegiance to

an end which he deems intrinsically worthy, except by showing it to

be inconsistent with some other end which _he_ (not you) deems more

worthy still. Dialectic can bring into clear consciousness the implicit

beliefs which underlie action, but it cannot either prove them or

refute them. It is as untrue to say that there is no disputing about

morals as to say that there is no disputing about tastes. But also it

is as true; and the truth, properly understood, is fundamental.

What pass for opposing arguments are really rival appeals; and it is

interesting to observe that the appeal which, to the unreflecting,

seems the most rational is the appeal to selfishness. I am told[6]

that on any fine Sunday afternoon in some of our big towns you may

find an orator asking why any man should love his country. “What,”

he inquires, “does a man get by it? Will national success bring

either to himself or to any of his hearers more food, more drink, more

amusements? If not, why make personal sacrifices for what will never

confer personal advantage?” To this particular question it might be

replied (though not always with truth) that the antithesis is a false

one, and that on the whole the selfish ideal and the patriotic ideal

are both promoted by the same policy of public service. But there is

another question of the same type to which no such answer is possible.

We have all heard it, either in jest or in earnest. “Why” (it is asked)

“should we do anything for posterity, seeing that posterity will do

nothing for us?” The implication is infamous, but the statement is

true. We cannot extract from posterity an equivalent for the sacrifices

we make on its behalf. These are debts that will never be recovered.

The unborn cannot be sued; the dead cannot be repaid. But what then?

Altruism is not based on egoism; it is not egoism in disguise. The ends

to which it points are ends in themselves; and their value is quite

independent of argument, neither capable of proof nor requiring it.

In what, then, consists the psychological (as distinguished from

the organic) “fitness” of the higher moral ideals? If it cannot be

found in their practical efficiency, nor yet in their argumentative

plausibility, where shall we seek it?

Sometimes, no doubt, the explanation is to be found in their

association with a culture, other elements of which do possess both

these kinds of “fitness.” Thus Western morality—or (to be accurate)

Western notions of morality—find favour with backward races, because

they are associated with Western armaments and Western arts. Again,

they may be diffused, perhaps as part of some militant religion, by the

power of the sword or by its prestige. They reach new regions in the

train of a conqueror, and willingly or unwillingly the conquered accept

them.

But these associations are seemingly quite casual. The prestige of

Western arts and science may assist the diffusion of Western morals,

as it assists the diffusion of Western languages, or Western clothes.

Conquests by Mahommedan or Christian States may substitute a higher

for a lower ethical creed in this or that region of the world. Such

cases, however, leave us still in the realm of accident. The causes

thus assigned for the spread of a particular type of ethical ideal

have nothing to do with the quality of that type. They would promote

bad morals not less effectively than good; as a hose will, with equal

ease, scatter dirty water or clean. Moreover, the growth of the higher

type in its place of origin is left wholly unexplained. Its “fitness”

seems a mere matter of luck due neither to design nor to any natural

imitation of design.

The rigour of this conclusion would be little mitigated even if

we could connect psychological fitness with some quite non-moral

peculiarity habitually associated with the higher morality, but not

with the lower. If, for example, the former were found to lead normally

to worldly success, its repute would need no further explanation. If,

in private life, those endowed with Sir Charles Grandison’s merits

usually possessed Sir Charles Grandison’s estate, if, in political or

national life, victory and virtue went ever hand in hand, morality

might be none the better, but certainly it would be more the fashion.

Heaven would be wearied with prayers for an unselfish spirit, uttered

by suppliants from purely selfish motives. Saints would become the

darlings of society, and the book of Job would be still unwritten.[7]

I can devise no more extravagant hypothesis. But though, if it were

true, the “fitness” of the higher morality might seem to have found an

explanation, it is not the explanation we require. It is too external.

It gives no account of the appeal which the nobler ends of action make

to our judgments of intrinsic value. It suggests the way in which a

higher ideal might increase the number of its possessors at the expense

of a lower, but not the way in which the higher ideal might itself

arise. Indeed, we must go further. Few are the moralists who would

maintain that indifference to worldly triumphs was not, on the whole,

a bar to their attainment. Few are the biologists who would maintain

that care and kindness, lavished on the biologically unfit, will never

tend to diminish the relative number of the biologically fit. But,

if so, we must agree with Nietzsche in thinking that ethical values

have become “denaturalised.” In their primitive forms the products of

selection, they have, by a kind of internal momentum, overpassed their

primitive purpose. Made by nature for a natural object, they have

developed along lines which are certainly independent of selection,

perhaps in opposition to it. And though not as remote from their first

manifestations as is the æsthetic of men from the æsthetic of monkeys,

no evolutionary explanation will bridge the interval. If we treat

the Sermon on the Mount as a naturalistic product, it is as much an

evolutionary accident as _Hamlet_ or the Ninth Symphony.

IV

In what setting, then, are we to place morality so that these

“denaturalised” values may be retained? Can we be content to regard

the highest loyalties, the most devoted love, the most limitless

self-abnegation as the useless excesses of a world-system, which in its

efforts to adapt organism to environment has overshot its mark?

I deem it impossible. The naturalistic setting must be expanded into

one which shall give the higher ethics an origin congruous with their

character. Selection must be treated as an instrument of purpose,

not simply as its mimic. Theistic teleology must be substituted for

Naturalism. Thus, and thus only, can moral values, as it seems to me,

be successfully maintained.

This would not, I suppose, have been denied by Nietzsche and

Nietzsche’s predecessors in revolt. On the contrary, they would admit

the interdependence of morals and religion, as these are commonly

understood in Christendom, and they would condemn both. It would,

however, have been vehemently denied by agnostics like Huxley; for

Huxley accepted, broadly speaking, Christian ethics, while refusing to

accept the Christian, or, indeed, any other form of theology.

In my opinion, this position is not permanently tenable. I do not mean

that it involves a logical contradiction. I do mean that it involves

an emotional and doctrinal incompatibility of a very fundamental

kind. And this is a defect which may be even more fatal than logical

contradiction to the stability of ethical beliefs.

For what was Huxley’s position? His condemnation of evolutionary ethics

was far more violent than my own. He states categorically that “What

is ethically best involves conduct which in all respects is opposed

to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence.”

On a biological question I differ from him with misgiving; but, as

I have already urged, selection may plausibly be credited with the

earlier stages of the noblest virtues. I cannot think that the mother

who sacrifices herself for her child, the clansman who dies for his

chief, the generation which suffers for the sake of its posterity,

are indulging in “conduct which is in all respects opposed to that

which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence.” But,

whether Huxley be right on this point or I, it is surely impossible

for the mass of mankind to maintain, at the cost of much personal

loss, an ideal of conduct which science tells us is not merely an

evolutionary accident, but an evolutionary mistake; something which

was, and is, contrary to the whole trend of the cosmic process which

brought us into being, and made us what we are. It requires but a small

knowledge of history to show how easily mankind idealises nature;

witness such phrases as “the return to nature,” the “state of nature,”

“natural rights,” “natural law,” and so forth. Appeals founded upon

these notions have proved powerful, even when they ran counter to

individualistic selfishness. When the two are in alliance, how can they

be resisted? Is it possible for the ordinary man to maintain undimmed

his altruistic ideals if he thinks Nature is against them?—unless,

indeed he also believes that God is on their side?

V

Here are questions raised to which there is no parallel in the case

of æsthetics. Doubtless differences of æsthetic judgment abound; but

they do not produce difficulties quite matching those due to the

collision of incompatible ends; nor is their solution so important. On

this subject I must say a few words before bringing this lecture to a

conclusion.

Possible collisions between ends are many, for ends themselves

are many. And of these ends some are in their very nature

irreconcilable;—based on essential differences which reflection only

makes more apparent, and moral growth more profound.

Now these collisions are not always between altruism and egoism.

Often they are between different forms of altruism—call them, if you

please, the positive form and the negative. Enmity, hate, cruelty,

tyranny, and all that odious brood whose end and object is the pain

and abasement of others are not intrinsically egoistic. Though they be

the vilest of all passions, yet they do not necessarily involve any

taint of selfish alloy. Often as disinterested as the most devoted

love or the most single-minded loyalty, they may demand no smaller

sacrifices on the part of those whom they inspire, and the demand may

be not less willingly obeyed. It is, perhaps, worth observing that

these altruistic ends, the positive and the negative, the benevolent

and the malevolent, irreconcilably opposed as they are in moral theory,

have often been associated in ethical practice. Family affection has in

many half-civilised communities produced the binding custom of family

vendetta. Political loyalty, which has blossomed into some of the

noblest forms of positive altruism, has also bred cruelty and hatred

against those who are outside the pale of the tribe, the state, the

party, or the creed. The brightest light has cast the deepest shadows.

To torture and enslave, not because it brings profit to the victor, but

because it brings pain to the vanquished, has, through long ages, been

deemed a fitting sequel to victories born of the most heroic courage

and the noblest self-sacrifice; while no small part of moral progress

has consisted in expelling this perverted altruism from the accepted

ideals of civilised mankind.

Egoism is far more reputable. The agent’s own good, considered

in itself, is, what negative altruism can never be, a perfectly

legitimate object of endeavour. When, therefore, there is a collision

between egoism and positive altruism, problems of real difficulty

may arise; the competing ends may both have value, and the need for

a reconciliation, practical as well as speculative, of necessity

impresses both moralists and legislators.

In practice the evils of this conflict arise largely from the fact

that the end which has most worth has too often least power. This

is not surprising if the account of ethical evolution, which I have

provisionally adopted in this lecture, be near the truth. For the

extra-regarding instincts are of later birth than the self-regarding.

All animals look after themselves. Only the more developed look also

after others. The germ of what, in reflection, becomes egoism is of far

earlier growth than the germ of what, in reflection, becomes altruism.

Being more primitive, it is more deeply rooted in our nature; and, even

when recognised as morally lower, it tends, when there is conflict, to

prevail over its rival. “The evil that I would not, that I do.”

Now this result has, as we all know, serious social consequences. Even

the least stable society must be organised on some firm framework

of custom, rule, and law; and these, in their turn, must find their

main support in the willing loyalty of the general community.

But, though loyalty is the great essential, it is not sufficient.

Legislators, lawyers, moralists, all agree that in the collision

between ends—especially between egoistic and altruistic ends—it is

not always the highest end as judged by the agent himself, still less

the highest end as measured by the standards of the community, which

finally prevails. Therefore must law and custom have the support of

sanctions: sanctions being nothing else than devices for bringing a

lower motive to the aid of a higher, and so producing better conduct,

if not[8] better morals. Public approval and disapproval, the jailer

and the hangman, heaven and hell, are familiar examples. Can they in

any true sense effect a reconciliation between discordant ends, and,

in particular, between altruism and egoism? I hardly think so. When

they are effective they doubtless diminish ethical conflict; but it

is by ignoring the intrinsic value of one set of ethical ends. In so

far as we are honest because honesty is the best policy, in so far as

we do not injure lest we should ourselves be injured, in so far as we

benefit that we may be benefited ourselves—just in that proportion we

treat altruistic actions merely as the means of attaining egoistic

ends. The two competitors are not reconciled, but a working arrangement

is reached under which the conduct appropriate to the higher ideal is

pursued from motives characteristic of the lower.

Is any truer reconciliation possible? Scarcely, as I think, without

religion. I do not suggest that _any_ religious theory gets rid of

ethical anomalies, or theoretically lightens by a feather-weight the

heavy problem of evil. But I do suggest that in the love of God by

the individual soul, the collision of ends _for that soul_ loses all

its harshness, and harmony is produced by raising, not lowering, the

ethical ideal.

Kant, by a famous feat of speculative audacity, sought to extract a

proof of God’s existence from the moral law. In his view the moral law

requires us to hold that those who are good will also in the end be

happy; and, since without God this expectation cannot be fulfilled,

the being of God becomes a postulate of morality. Is this (you may

ask), or any variant of this, the argument suggested in the last

paragraph? It is not. In Kant’s argument, as I understand it, God was

external to morality in the sense that He was not Himself a moral

end. It was not our feeling of love and loyalty to Him that was of

moment, but His guidance of the world in the interests of virtue and

the virtuous. My point is different. I find in the love of God a moral

end which reconciles other moral ends, because it includes them. It

is not intolerant of desires for our own good. It demands their due

subordination, not their complete suppression. It implies loyal service

to One who by His essential nature wills the good of all. It requires,

therefore, that the good of all shall be an object of our endeavour;

and it promises that, in striving for this inclusive end, we shall, in

Pauline phrase, be fellow-workers with Him.

I will not further pursue this theme. Its development is plainly

inappropriate to these lectures, which are not directly concerned with

personal religion. In any case, this portion of my argument, though

important, is subsidiary. My main contention rests, not upon the

difficulty of harmonising moral ends in a Godless universe, but upon

the difficulty of maintaining moral values if moral origins are purely

naturalistic. That they never have been so maintained on any large

scale is a matter of historic fact. At no time has the mass of mankind

treated morals and religion as mutually independent. They have left

this to the enlightened; and the enlightened have (as I think) been

wrong.

They have been wrong through their omission to face the full results of

their own theories. If the most we can say for morality on the causal

side is that it is the product of non-moral, and ultimately of material

agents, guided up to a certain point by selection, and thereafter left

the sport of chance, a sense of humour, if nothing else, should prevent

us wasting fine language on the splendour of the moral law and the

reverential obedience owed it by mankind. That debt will not long be

paid if morality comes to be generally regarded as the causal effect

of petty causes; comparable in its lowest manifestations with the

appetites and terrors which rule, for their good, the animal creation;

in its highest phases no more than a personal accomplishment, to be

acquired or neglected at the bidding of individual caprice. More than

this is needful if the noblest ideals are not to lose all power of

appeal. Ethics must have its roots in the divine; and in the divine it

must find its consummation.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] Written in 1913.

[7] Doubtless under such circumstances ideal virtue might also have

survival value in the biological sense.

[8] Indirectly, no doubt, sanctions may perform a most important

educational work in stimulating and guiding the higher loyalties. The

approval or disapproval of our fellows, the “terrors of the law,” the

belief in future rewards and punishments, though their immediate appeal

is only to self-interest, may powerfully aid in the creation of moral

judgments sufficiently free from any “empirical elements of desire” to

have satisfied Kant himself.